Who Will Rescue Isaac Now? Proper 8A, Gen 22:1-4, June 26, 2011

Second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 8A)
Genesis 22:1-14
June 26, 2011

Who Will Rescue Isaac Now?

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

The Bible is not a pretty book. It is populated with glorious stories of deliverance and reconciliation, of promises made and kept. It has lyric poetry that soars as high as the human spirit can fly. It has depths we cannot plumb in a single lifetime.

But it also contains what the scholar Phyllis Trible calls “texts of terror.” There are stories that horrify and repel. This story is one of them. This is one of the stories that gets the Bible an “R” rating. Reading this story closely is not for the faint of heart. That the Revised Common Lectionary committee has set it before us suggests that this story is also one that cannot be ignored. So we won’t ignore it.

But neither will we clean it up or sugar-coat it. If the Bible and the God whom we meet in its pages could not stand close questioning, then they would not be worth my time. If they could not withstand careful scrutiny, I would find a different line of work doing something more worthwhile and useful.

But as it is, I believe that even these texts, perhaps especially these “texts of terror,” are worth the strenuous conversation we must have with them. For it is in part in deeply engaging stories like this one that we grow up to mature faith.

So let’s begin by setting aside the notion that, since God was only testing Abraham, somehow that makes everything okay. The narrator tells us that God set out to test Abraham, but Abraham knew nothing of this. All Abraham knew was that he was summoned: “Abraham!” Abraham was summoned by a voice that he recognized. He answered in the way that people usually do in the Bible when God addresses them: “Here I am!” In this exchange, this two-line dialogue, God and Abraham are set in a relationship in which God addresses and Abraham answers. From that fact alone, we would know where the power lies. God has the initiative. If this were a chess game, we would say that God is playing white.

So that’s how this story begins. And Abraham knows it.

“Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you,” God said. “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love.” God names Isaac three times, as if there could be any question about which son God meant.

Abraham was new in the covenant people business and did not have a tradition to draw on for understanding the sorts of things God would ask. There were no seminaries filled with scholars writing books of systematic theology that would help Abraham sort things out. There was only the Voice who had promised an inheritance and a son to inherit it, the miracle son born to Sarah and Abraham in their old age.

Abraham did not know and could not know whether this demand was in or out of character for God. There was only the Voice and its demand. We do not know, but we can imagine, what went through Abraham’s mind as he gathered what would be necessary for the sacrifice and for the journey. I suspect that Abraham brought nothing for the return trip; his life, too, would end at Moriah. We shudder to imagine what it would do to any of us to be put in Abraham’s position. What did he tell Sarah?

We can imagine, but we do not know what was in his heart as he walked, Isaac carrying the wood, and he the fire and the knife.

We do not know what was in his heart as Isaac innocently asked, “Where is the lamb?” and he replied with an answer with a double meaning, “God will provide.” He avoided saying the obvious—“You are the lamb for sacrifice that God has already provided.” In his use of the future tense—God will provide—was he calling God’s bluff, if a bluff it was? But there was no answer as Abraham walked with his son, his only son Isaac, the son whom he loved.

Abraham went about the preparation of the altar, piling the stones, laying the wood, binding his son and readying the knife. And there was still no answer from God.

What was in God’s heart as Abraham obeyed God’s summons? We do not know. Did God expect that Abraham would resist this insanity, this inhumane demand? After all, Abraham had resisted God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and Abraham’s argument then had been precisely that innocent blood should not be spilled—even by God—in the name of justice. But if God was surprised there is no hint of it in the story.

So there they went, a stubborn old man and his God, or perhaps a stubborn old God and his man, it’s really hard to say which, toward the edge of an abyss. There is such an abyss in every relationship. God and Abraham were racing toward the edge of theirs.

Abraham reached out his hand to kill his son, his only son Isaac, whom he loved, and God blinked. Someone had to. Someone had to call off this terrible game of chicken. This, after all, was not simply a test of Abraham. It was also a test of God. That’s the way it works in a covenant. If we have ever been so foolish as to put someone we have loved to the test, we know that it works both ways. And we learn that we cannot do this to someone we love and expect a relationship to come out of it without wounds. Abraham and God learned this the hard way.

Sometimes our journey takes us through a very hard place. It may feel like a test. Hard places, however, in life, in our relationships with each other, in our relationship with God, are not tests. They are reality. Reality is sometimes very hard, but it is not a game that God plays with us. Not again. Not after the fiasco at Moriah.

That’s something at least. Something we can take away from this tale of terror. But it is not all that we are asked to see.

There is one more character yet to be heard from. This story is told as if it were a contest of sorts between two protagonists. There is God; there is Abraham; and, there is the narrator who offers us a safe place from which to view the events as they play out. But there is a fourth position in the story and we have not looked at him yet.

That position is Isaac’s. He was a child at the mercy of an adult who was caught up in a contest with God. If Isaac was old enough to carry the wood, if he was old enough to ask where the sacrificial lamb was, he was certainly old enough to have an inkling of what was happening, to sense its menace. Perhaps Abraham and God learned their lesson about the futility of testing each other’s love. But what did Isaac take away from this? Could he ever trust his father again? Abraham may have protested that he wasn’t going to go through with it, that the angel intervened at precisely the point that Abraham was going to refuse to pass, but how could Isaac ever know that for certain? God may have protested that, after all, the angel did intervene and nothing really happened. But Isaac was really brought by his father’s obedience to God’s demand to a place of stark terror. Isaac would live his life in the shadow of that memory.

Perhaps God and Abraham came to the place where they could trust each other once again. I’m not so sure of Isaac. Or of his children and descendants, across whose lives this shadow also fell. Did this demand for a child sacrifice echo through the generations and centuries? Did it haunt God as well as God’s people? Was the death of Jesus—I’m speculating here. Remember I don’t necessarily believe everything I think—was the death of Jesus God’s way of atoning for the crime committed at Moriah?

I ask the question because I think it still haunts us. We seem unable to avoid reenacting it. Even though we know that a god who demands such a death is not worth our worship. Even though we know that a father who obeys such a command is not worthy the title. Even though the very hint that people would offer up their own children as a sacrifice is repugnant to us. In spite of all of that, in spite of all of that, why is it that we still do it?

Make no mistake, this story is a mirror held up to our own life. And looking into it we see into our souls. We are summoned by a voice that demands their lives. And we send them. When they come back to us, scarred by what they have seen and done and had done to them, wounded in soul and body, or perhaps even dead, we call their injury or their death a “sacrifice.” And I want to know, “Who is the god who dares to demand this blood?” And I want to ask, “Who will rescue Isaac now?”

This has been hard, I know. I did warn you that the Bible isn’t a pretty book. I said that the Bible contains stories of deliverance but also texts of terror. In this case they are one and the same. Here, in this terrible text, precisely because of the terror, we have the possibility of being delivered from the cycle of death that our world has turned into a religion. In this story we, too, hear a Voice that summons us, not to offering our children as sacrifices, but a Voice that says, “Do not lay your hand on the child.”

It is a long journey from where we are to the peace that God promises, fully as long as the journey to which God called Abraham and Sarah when they left their homes for the land of promise. But if we hear the Voice that calls to us and take one little step in that direction, we will be well begun on that journey. Whatever else we might need for that journey, God will provide.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

What Do You Do With a Problem Like the Trinity?, Trinity A, Gen 1:1--2:4a, Mt 28:16-20, June 19, 2001

Trinity - A
Genesis 1:1--2:4a
Matthew 28:16-20
June 19, 2011

What Do You Do With a Problem Like the Trinity?

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

The title of the sermon that I set out to preach was “Room for Every People.” It was going to be based on the Matthew text and it was going to be about the broad inclusiveness of the movement that Jesus founded. I set out to preach that sermon and I think it might have been a good one. I got sidetracked.

I got sidetracked by three things. The first two are the scripture lessons that we have heard. They don’t seem to have a great deal to do with each other. The first is one of two creation stories featured in Genesis. The second is the so-called Great Commission. The first tells the story of God speaking the universe, our world, the plants and animals that occupy it, and finally us into being. In the second, Jesus tells his disciples (and we are meant to overhear) to make disciples of Jesus Christ. What do the two have in common?

What an odd pair of texts for Trinity Sunday! And that’s the third thing that distracted me: the fact that today is the first Sunday after Pentecost, which in our liturgical calendar makes it Trinity Sunday. So my new sermon title (with apologies to Rogers and Hammerstein) is, “What Do You Do With a Problem Like the Trinity?”

The texts seem to have been chosen because they both refer to the Trinity. Matthew does it openly and clearly: Jesus tells us that as we make disciples we are to baptized them “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

The Genesis text is less clear, but the Christian tradition has read this passage in a way that makes a connection. In the very first verse there is God. In the second verse there is the Holy Spirit: the wind from God that “swept over the face of the waters.” In both Hebrew and Greek, there is only one word for breath, wind and spirit. So the wind is spirit and the spirit is from God and therefore it is the Holy Spirit. Okay, but where is the Son? The Christian tradition has found the Son in the third verse, where God speaks. God’s speech is God’s word. Christ is referred to in John’s gospel and in other places as well as God’s “word.” So there you have it: the Trinity at creation.

With all due respect to our tradition this sounds like a bit of a stretch to me. Then, while I was mowing my yard yesterday and ruminating on these things, something fell into place. It turns out that the two passages have more in common than direct and indirect mentions of the Trinity. They are both stories that were told while God’s people were dealing with an empire. In the first, God’s people were living in exile in the city of Babylon, the home city of the Babylonian empire. In the second, God’s people were dealing with the Roman empire. A good guess for where Matthew’s gospel was written puts it in Antioch of Syria, a very important city of the eastern empire, one that often served as a garrison for Roman legions.

What is even more important about our two stories is that they were both stories that were told against their respective empires. They are both resistance stories, stories of resistance to the empire in which they live.

Now that’s not immediately obvious, so it’s only fair that I tell you why I say that.

In the Genesis passage we have a creation story in which God makes all that is in a series of creative acts that are described as “good.” The Babylonians have a creation story, too. In that story, Marduk, the chief of the gods of Babylon, created the world by defeating the dragon Tiamat and using the halves of her carcass to fashion the heavens and the earth. Marduk then created humankind to work so that the gods wouldn’t have to.

Tiamat is hinted at in Genesis. The word for “the deep,” the formless waters that existed before God spoke, is tehôm, a word that is both related and close enough in sound to Tiamat that the hearers would have gotten the connection. But God subdues the tehôm with a simple word of command; there is no need for combat. Compared to our God, this Jewish text says, Marduk is not much of a god. This a bold assertion when we remember that the Jews were a people who had been conquered and taken into exile by the armies of Babylon. “We may be a subject people,” the text seems to say, “but we have the dignity of belonging to a God who makes yours look a swaggering blowhard.”

Perhaps even more subversive is the way in which the days of creation are arranged. The Babylonians also had a seven-day week and their creation story distributes creative acts to each day of the week like this story. But the Genesis story squeezes the work of creation into only six days, leaving the seventh day as a day of rest. The Jewish tradition has looked back on this story and said that the very crown of creation is not humanity, though that was pretty cool, “very good,” according to the story. The crown of creation is Shabbat, sabbath, rest.

But look a little closer: Marduk made human beings so that the gods wouldn’t have to do any work. People would do all the work. This then becomes the pattern for human life. Just as people exist to do the work so that the gods don’t have to, the lower classes exist to do the work so that royalty and nobility don’t have to. And other cities and peoples exist so that Babylon can live in luxury without having to work for it. As is true of all creation stories, this one serves as an explanation of the world.

The Jewish exiles by making Shabbat the crowning glory of its creation story, told a story that struck at the very heart of Babylon’s ideology. Human beings weren’t created so that God would have minions. When God made human beings, God put them in charge of creation! When God is done with creation, God rests. But the rest isn’t just for God; it’s for everybody and everything. On Shabbat, people rest, all people. Rich or poor, they rest. Slave or free, they rest. Young and old, they rest. Men and women rest. The animals rest. Even the land gets its rest one year out of seven.

The Babylonian story justifies the rule of the gods over people, the rule of kings over common folk, the rule of Babylon over its subject peoples. The world is arranged like a pyramid and everyone serves the one above them. The Babylonians imagined into being a world in which there is perpetual need. Even the gods can starve to death. They will unless someone serves them. Marduk solved the god’s problem by conquering Tiamat. The Babylonians look to solve theirs by conquering their neighbors. The strong are rich; the weak are poor.

The story of the Jewish exiles subverts all of that. Their story imagines into being a world in which the earth is good. The good earth supports our life so that we don’t have to labor all the time. In fact, we can do nothing at all one day each week and there will still be enough. We can give the land one year in seven to produce whatever it chooses to produce and there will still be enough. The story of Shabbat is a story of resistance to empire.

Matthew’s story is a story of resistance, too. Matthew’s empire is Rome, not Babylon, but the resemblances are still there. Remember how Matthew starts? He starts with a genealogy, like the stories that kinds and emperors tell about themselves. Then he has a story in which imperial counselors come from the east and ask to see the new-born king. Do you remember the reaction of the actual king? The empire strikes back at any threat, real or perceived. Anything is justified when it comes to defending its power, even the slaughter of innocents. I think we call them “collateral damage” nowadays. At the other end of the story, Jesus is killed because he threatened the political and religious arrangements in occupied Roman Palestine.

Matthew tells his story of Jesus in part as a story of Jesus’ and his followers’ resistance to the Empire. His favorite strategy is irony. Herod in his palace imagines himself safe from political threat. In the meantime the real king has been born and lives in a house so ordinary that it can’t be found without neon signs—or wandering stars, I can’t remember which. Jesus preaches a new reality that he calls “heaven’s empire.” The greatest irony is that one who died a despised death at the hands of the empire should be the one who carries imperial titles like the Son of God.

In our story today, Matthew uses imperial language ironically yet again. The Romans claimed to have brought all the world’s peoples into its empire. Shedding their blood and at the point of a sword, all the world’s people were brought into submission to Roman laws. In Matthew’s story, Jesus tells his disciples, just eleven of them in this account, to do what the Roman legions had done, only for them it will be different. They won’t make subjects; they will make disciples. They won’t spill blood; they will baptize with water. They won’t impose Roman law; they will teach people what Jesus told them: love your enemies, be peacemakers, seek justice above everything else so that you will have what you need.

Read in this way, these stories become powerful stories of resistance told against whatever the current empire happens to be.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that they can’t be told differently. They have been. The story of a world that is so good that we may live in it without scarcity, has been told as a story that gives us permission to do anything to creation that we want in our zeal to exercise dominion. Read in this way, the story becomes an excuse to act just like the Babylonians. The story of Jesus’ sending the disciples read in another way gives them permission to behave just like the Romans have: compelling everyone to submit to their way of life and faith and threatening them with (eternal) death if they don’t.

Both of these stories have been used as imperial narratives, but I’m asking us to let them resistance stories instead. I’m asking us to do this, because have our own empire to deal with, an empire every bit as ruthless as either of these. In the face of our empire, we are summoned to live faithfully and these subversive stories are one of our very few resources for doing that.

These stories also tell us something about the character of the triune God to whom we belong. (You thought I had forgotten!) The world is good and we are good because the God who made us is good. The God who made us delights in our delight, not our slavish devotion.

The God who made us lived among us. In the person of Jesus God lived life from our perspective. He woke up hungry at night. He needed his diapers changed. He learned to talk and walk. He puzzled over the injustices he saw around him. He longed for peace. And he taught us how we might life lives in the face of the empire that are fully human, just and peaceful.

The God who made us and who walked alongside us continues to live within each of us and within our communities. So we have all we need to resist the dehumanizing forces around us, the strength we need to live as Jesus taught us. We have all that we need to hear these stories come alive for us and through us. We have all we need to tell our own stories in our own day out of our own struggle.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

"Wild Card," Pentecost A, Acts 2:1-21, June 12, 2011

Pentecost - A
Acts 2:1-21
June 12, 2011

Wild Card

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Every year the members of the Annual Conference gather for four days of worshiping, celebrating our mission and ministry, and engaging in holy conferencing. That’s one way to put it. Another way to put it is that every year we gather for four days of spinning our message, promoting our own institutions, and bickering with one another about money and sex. Both ways of describing what the Annual Conference does are more or less accurate. The difference between them has to do with how tired and frustrated the story teller is. Let me say that I bless Alan Lerstrom and Kathi Mitchell for being willing to take on the role of lay member of Annual Conference.

As difficult as it can be sometimes, the Annual Conference is important. Our Book of Discipline describes the Annual Conference as the “basic organizational unit of the United Methodist Church.” Its major business this year was the election of delegates to the next General Conference. Our General Conference meets every four years and is the voice of the global United Methodist Church. It sets the agenda for our denomination for the next four years, or what we call a “quadrennium.” It is composed of clergy and laity delegated by Annual Conferences from around the world. Kathi Mitchell decided to stand as a candidate for the lay delegation from our Annual Conference this year. She did pretty well, all things considered, though she didn’t gain a spot on either the General Conference or Jurisdictional Conference delegations.

If you’re not bewildered by just this mention of three different kind of Conferences it’s because you’ve been around United Methodists for a long time. The universal first impression of our denomination is that it is organized to a fare-thee-well. We can’t really help it. It’s in our denomination’s DNA. The founder of our movement, John Wesley, came at life in an extremely organized fashion. That’s the nice way to put it. The Freudian and perhaps not so nice way to put it would be to say that he was “anal retentive.” Basically, he was a control freak.

Control freaks seek structure and order, especially when there isn’t enough structure and order. If they are high-functioning control freaks, they are able to bring their organizational vision to bear on disordered circumstances in a helpful way. If they are not high-functioning they try to control everything by stamping out all creativity and spontaneity. Those who are not control freaks find this annoying.

Every movement, every organization, and I think, every person needs some degree of order. And every movement, every organization, and every person needs some degree of creative freedom. Even a machine needs a certain amount of what is called “play.” A wheel bearing needs a few thousandths of an inch of wiggle room. Otherwise it will overheat, the surfaces will weld together and it will freeze up. Too much wiggle room and a bearing will wear out, and then it will overheat, weld together and freeze up.

In the religious context, too little play leads to what we call legalism. Without enough play, all we see are the rules. Rules are good. They are intended to help us live by showing us the shape of the world that we live in. They show us a life that will work with rather than against the grain of the universe.

But when all we see are the rules, our lives become like wheel bearings with too little play. We overheat. Parts of our lives that are supposed to slip over each other, stick instead. We grind to a halt. Too many rules that are too tight result in the end of all movement. For living beings, that is the same thing as death.

At the other end of the spectrum from organization, order and control are creativity, freedom and spontaneity. We who are part of the biblical tradition have always called that end of the spectrum “spirit.” In fact, since it expresses part of God’s nature we have called it “The Spirit of Yahweh” or “The Spirit of God.”

It’s only fair to warn you that, coming as it does from the opposite end of spectrum from order and control, the Spirit (with a capital “S”) can be more than a little disturbing, upsetting, anxiety-provoking and even scary.

Consider the images of the Spirit that are used in the Bible. Yes, a dove is used as one of those images. At the scene of Jesus’ baptism in Mark’s gospel, for example, the heavens are torn open and a dove descends on Jesus. A heaven-splitting dove is disturbing enough, but then the dove “drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness,” using the same word that describes Jesus driving the money-changers out of the temple. So much for harmless, gentle doves.

We might make “windy” noises, but we know about mighty winds. We’ve seen “mighty winds” wreak havoc all across the southern part of our country and even in our own state. “Mighty winds” are nothing to mess around with.

We might wave red, orange and yellow crêpe paper over each other’s heads. But real fire, another of the favorite images for the Spirit, has a disturbing double aspect. On the one hand, fire gives light, transforms flesh into meat, dough into bread, clay into pottery and ore into metal. It heats our homes. It adds atmosphere, too. A candle-lit dinner loses something if the candles aren’t lit. But as the folks of Arizona know too well, fire can be enormously destructive and dangerous. As of yesterday, the wildfire there had burned over 629 square miles. That’s a square that’s twenty-five miles on a side.

The Spirit is creative, powerful and life-giving. It is also playful, wild and unpredictable. The Spirit has little respect for rules or structures or orderly processes. It avoids committee meetings and conferences. It doesn’t keep appointments reliably.

The Spirit is God at God’s freest. It cannot be tamed or domesticated or produced on demand by any technique or technology. The Spirit of God is a church bureaucrat’s worst nightmare. Its unmanageability gives headaches to church managers at every level—from bishops to pastors. Like new wine it ferments and foments and ruins any attempt to squeeze it into old containers.

And here we are today, celebrating the gift of the Spirit and asking for more! What are we thinking?

As chaotic as the Spirit is, it is also the source of our life as a movement. The times of greatest challenge for the Christian movement have also been the times when the Spirit’s work has become the most evident. In our own challenging times we need the presence of the Spirit among us.

The trick, I suppose, is discovering how to live with the Spirit when all attempts to get it to work through our committees fails. It’s not a matter of striking a balance. Whenever the Spirit gets involved, balance is no longer an option. It’s more a matter of keeping our feet and trying to go with the flow. I remember a story about a Taoist master and his disciple who were walking along a rain-swollen river when the master stumbled on a rock and fell in. The horror-stricken disciple ran along the river as fast as he could, trying in vain to keep up with his master and to find some way to rescue him. The master was swept out of sight around a bend in river, but the disciple did not give up. Finally, he came upon the old man, sitting on a rock beside the river, soaking wet and laughing. He asked, “Master, are you all right? What happened?” The master answered, “Well, as you know, I fell into the river. It carried me along for a while and then I fell out again. And here I am.”

We need to figure out how to become more supple, able to change direction quickly in response to the Spirit’s movement. We need less of five year plans and more of taking the very next step, the one set in front of us and trusting that the Spirit will bear us up. We need fewer committees and more ministry. We need less structure and more life. We need less work and more play. We need fewer rules and more room to move.

How much more? I don’t know. How much is too much? I don’t know. When do we get to the point that creative play becomes destructive chaos? I don’t know. How much of the Spirit should we ask for? I don’t know how much. I only know we need more. So we’ll ask for more. And let God decide how much.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

6th Sunday of Easter - A, John 14:15-21, "Not Alone"

6th Sunday of Easter
John 14:15-21
May 29, 2011

Not Alone

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Alone. Is there a more frightening word in the English language? I don’t mean the kind of alone that is a welcome relief to me, an introvert, after Annual Conference—four days of being confined in a closed space with twelve hundred of my closest friends!

I mean the kind of alone that we don’t choose. The kind of alone that tears a chunk out of our lives and out of our hearts and leaves us bleeding. The kind of alone that looms over us and we know that it isn’t going to end. That kind of alone.

We are hard-wired to dread this kind of aloneness. Thanks to our over-sized brains we are born long before we can do anything at all for ourselves. We can suck and we can cry and that’s about it. We are absolutely dependent on other people to meet every need for survival. Without other people we would die. Period. We are hard-wired to find being alone very anxious-making.

It’s not that there aren’t people who have faced down that anxiety. Chuck Noland, Tom Hanks character in Cast Away, found himself marooned on an island in the South Pacific. He had to figure out how to survive using only what was already on the island, the flotsam that had washed up on the island, and his own wits. He was entirely alone. Well, he was technically alone, but in reality not quite. You may remember that he had a volleyball named Wilson who became his one companion.

Sigmund Freud told a story about his grandson Ernst who was then about a year and a half old. When his mother was gone from the house, Ernst would play a game which Freud called “Fort/da.” Ernst had a length of string tied to an empty spool. He would throw it out of sight over the edge of his bed and say, “ooooo,” which Freud understood to be “fort,” German for “gone.” Then he would pull on the string until the spool was back in sight and announce, “da!” German for “there it is!” Freud theorized that Ernst was using this game to rehearse his mother’s going away and return, that he had “transferred” (a favorite word of Freud’s) his anxiety over his mother’s absence to the spool. Maybe so. And maybe the “peek-a-boo” game that we play with toddlers is like that. Young children who would not survive actual abandonment can turn it into a game with a happy ending. Maybe so.

In the ancient world abandonment was no game. In the ruthlessly competitive world of ancient society, a person’s survival depended primarily on their family connections. To lose those connections was a disaster. The word “orphaned” in our reading, refers to someone who has lost these connections. Incidentally, the Greek word orphanos is where we got our word “orphan.” Oddly, for us who are accustomed of thinking of orphans as children, in Greek it can mean either a child whose parents have died, or an adult whose children have died. Either way, an orphan is alone in the world, at the mercy of everyone around them and without protection.

This is why Jesus in the same passage promises an “Advocate,” that is, someone who will stand up with his disciples in court, like an attorney. It also explains why translators can never seem to decide whether to translate the word as “advocate” or “counselor” on the one hand or as “comforter” or “consoler” on the other. The reality is that an orphan needs both a good lawyer and emotional support. There just isn’t any single word in English that will do the trick.

In our passage Jesus promises that, even though he will be absent—since he is returning “to the Father”—his disciples will not become orphans. Through the Spirit of truth who will be a counselor/attorney/consoler/comforter to the disciples, Jesus will be present and so will “the Father.” They will not be alone.

As always when we are reading the Bible we need to remember that the writer of this gospel is not telling the reader anything new. John’s readers already knew these stories, so that’s not why they were written. The gospel was written so that the readers could hear the stories being told in such a way as to help them face their present situation.

And the situation John’s readers faced was very hard. The majority of scholars date this book to around 90 ad, some sixty years after Jesus was crucified. This event was as far away to his readers as the bombing of Pearl Harbor is to us. If Jesus’ earliest followers expected him to return in triumph to defeat evil and transform the world soon after he rose from the dead, they would be beginning to wonder what was keeping him. They may even have begun to believe that the world as they knew it was the reality they would have to keep living with.

The Jesus movements had grown and gained in numbers to the point where it was coming to the notice of the Romans that there was a new sect of Judaism that was following Jesus whom they had executed as a rebel and criminal but whose followers believed was alive. The larger Jewish community for its part was reeling from the revolt of 69-70 and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Jewish attempts to define who they were as a people ran headlong into Jewish Christian attempts to redefine Judaism. There was a bitter conflict between Jewish followers of Jesus and Jewish non-followers of Jesus that resulted in Jewish communities being torn in two and Jesus-followers being expelled from the synagogues.

These followers of Jesus who were thoroughly Jewish found themselves on the outside looking in, sometimes separated from their own families as the boundary lines were being drawn. They were threatened by confusion within and by persecution from the outside. They were stripped of the modest legal protection of being a sect within the Jewish people and exposed to Roman suspicion and accusations. And just where was Jesus, anyway, and when was he coming back?

They felt bereft, abandoned, and left behind. They were exiles in their own communities. They didn’t know what to do next. They weren’t sure they had the energy or the courage to do it even if they knew what it was. They were demoralized.

I get that way, sometimes. Not most of the time, just sometimes. Most of the time I soldier on, doing the little good I can where I am. But sometimes I see things too clearly. And then I feel overwhelmed.

I’ve been carrying around a moment like that from our time in Portrerillos. It’s been haunting me.

While we were in Portrerillos Brandon Schmidt and I stayed in the home of a woman named Edís. One morning in addition to the usual tortillas, beans, fried plantains and fresh fruit, Edís offered us a box of corn flakes. It looked both familiar and strange. Carol says that I will read anything, and cereal boxes are no exception. It was an ordinary box of ordinary cereal. In the list of ingredients the very first item was maíz (corn). No surprise there. But it was not simply maíz. It was listed as maíz desgerminado, “degerminated” corn, corn with the germ removed, corn stripped of its most nutritious part, the part with most of the protein and other nutrients.

Now, the people of Portrerillos know something about corn. They are, in fact, direct descendants of the folks who domesticated corn. They have been planting and eating corn for centuries. Since they don’t have any fields, they plant corn and beans on the hillsides. And they plant them together. The people of Central America didn’t just domesticate corn; they also figured out that corn and beans are a good combination. They are good for the soil. Beans put back what corn takes away. They are also good because corn and beans between them supply all of the amino acids that people need.

For centuries, since long before the Spanish came to plunder whatever wealth they could find, before they came to enslave the people, before they came to force the people to turn to growing crops that the Spanish could sell, centuries before the people of Portrerillos started speaking Spanish, the people of Portrerillos grew corn and beans. It was a way of living that worked and it still works.

But now, you see, they can have corn flakes, corn flakes made of the least nutritious part of the corn, corn flakes that will contribute empty calories and obesity to a people who do not have money or health to spare. Now they can have corn flakes made in a far away place and trucked to them over roads that shouldn’t be carrying the traffic. And to pay for the corn flakes and other consumer goods the young men of Portrerillos are mostly somewhere else, working at jobs no one else wants and sending money back home.

I looked at the box of corn flakes and suddenly felt that I was looking at a good deal of what has gone wrong in our world. A box of corn flakes is undermining a delicate balance that the people of Portrerillos have with their fragile land. A box of corn flakes is turning the community of Portrerillos into an accidental association of individuals who happen to live near each other. I looked at the box of corn flakes and felt that I was staring into the eyes of the Beast. And I felt terribly, terribly alone.

How can I fight the Beast? How can I even fight the Beast on my own behalf, let alone on behalf of our friends in Portrerillos? How can I even explain what I mean? How can I say it clearly, so that it makes sense, even to me? So, you see, sometimes I feel overwhelmed.

But to those of John’s community who felt overwhelmed, John’s Jesus says this: “You are not alone. I have not left you orphaned.” John reminded his community of what they needed to remember. He reminded them about the Holy Spirit. We know about the Holy Spirit. It’s that mysterious third part of the Trinity, something we don’t understand, not even a little. We were baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And at our confirmation, hands were placed on our heads and the work of the Spirit within us asked for.

John wants his community to know that these were not just words. The truth is that the Spirit is with them as counselor/attorney/consoler/comforter. They are not alone. They have not been abandoned. They are not bereft of the presence and power they need to be who they are called to be and to do what needs to be done.

And neither are we. We are God’s children. The Spirit has been given to us. We know who we are. We know that we can do what needs to be done next. We know that we are God’s beloved. We are not bereft. We are not orphans. We are not alone.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.